Zebra Murders

Remembering The Zebra Killings

MOST SERIAL KILLINGS in America take on a life of their own through movies, books and documentaries. The crimes of Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer and The Son of Sam are still well remembered years after they were committed. Yet there is one set of serial killings that has been almost completely forgotten and is rarely mentioned in popular culture.The Zebra Killings occurred in the San Francisco bay area between 1972 and 1974 and left 71 people dead. They were dubbed the Zebra Killings because of the radio channel used by the police investigating the case (channel Z). The name would take on a more sinister meaning as it became apparent that a group of blacks was systematically stalking and killing whites simply because of the color of their skin.Zebra (1979) was written by crime writer Clark Howard and remains the definitive book on the murders. Using court records, police reports, witnesses and interviews with the killers themselves, Howard was able to piece together the horrid details of the murders and the unrelenting hatred that inspired the killers.The majority of the attacks were carried out by five members of a group within Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam called the “Death Angels.” Jesse Lee Cooks, J.C. Simon, Larry Green, Manuel Moore and Anthony Harris were part of this group which believed that whites were created 3,000 years ago by a black mad scientist named Yacub who wanted a race of inferiors to rule over. Death Angels believed they could earn “points” towards going to heaven when they died if they killed whites. For them, whites were not human beings but “grafted snakes,” “blue-eyed devils” and “white motherf—–s.”Howard describes the vicious and cowardly nature of the attacks, which were made at gunpoint and mostly carried out against women and weak or old men who could not fight back. The first victims in San Francisco were a couple named Richard and Quita Hague. The Hagues were out for an after dinner walk when they were abducted at gunpoint and forced into a van. They were bound and Richard was beaten over the head with a lug wrench and knocked unconscious. Quita was sexually molested and hacked with a machete. While begging for her life she was decapitated. Before leaving, the attackers hacked at the face of the still unconscious man. Miraculously, he survived and was able to give valuable information to the police.Brutality and a lack of remorse on the part of the criminals mark the attacks. Vincent Wollin was shot in the back and killed on his 69th birthday. Mildred Hosler, an obese, older woman was shot while frantically trying to get away from her younger, faster attacker. Ilario Bertucci, a 135-pound, 81-year-old man, was killed while walking home from work. Marietta DiGirolamo, a 5’1″ white woman was shot and killed on her way to a neighborhood bar. In none of these cases did the victims do anything to provoke the murderers. They simply had white skin and were in the wrong place at the wrong time.There were even some high profile victims. Art Agnos, who would later go on to become mayor of San Francisco, was shot and almost killed by the Death Angels. A member of the California Commission on Aging, Agnos was attending a community meeting in a black neighborhood to discuss building a government funded health clinic in the area. In the same neighborhood the killers were hunting for whites. As the meeting let out, Agnos stopped to talk with two women. One of the killers came up behind him and shot him twice in the back. The bullets ripped apart his lungs, spleen and kidneys. Bystanders called an ambulance and Agnos barely survived.Lou Calabro was a street patrol sergeant with the San Francisco Police Department at the time and notes that as the murders added up, the SFPD came under increasing pressure to stop the killings:“In what was known as Operation Zebra, more police were put on the street and security checks were beefed up. Despite the increased police presence, the attacks did not stop. They would often happen when we were on full alert. Some officers suspected a black cop who was a member of ‘Officers for Justice,’ a black police officers association formed to get more promotions for themselves, was tipping off the killers, though this was never proven. We were very frustrated at not being able to stop the killings.”

The increased police presence had the effect of angering the black community. Twenty years before the Los Angeles riots and O.J. Simpson trial, blacks were already making statements to the press that showed a stunning lack of remorse for what was happening to their white neighbors. Howard quotes from interviews conducted by the San Francisco Examiner in 1974. Among the responses by blacks were, “I don’t feel comfortable with all the police around. But then, I never have felt safe around them.” A young housewife stated, “I’m really glad the police are concerned for a change. I just wonder if they would be as much concerned if it were black people getting killed.” A black lawyer added, “I commend the police for their beefing up of the force, but I hope it’s not just directed at blacks. I hope blacks aren’t being harassed.”

Still other blacks blamed “unemployment” and “oppression” for the attacks. One man said, “the madness that drives black men to kill innocent people . . . involves a sickness that is as American as apple pie.” Black Panther leader Bobby Seale declared, “every black man in the Bay area is in danger of losing his life.” The Reverend Cecil Williams claimed that the entire black community was “under a police state that could erupt into a racial war.” Howard observes, “although they were responding only to a question about Operation Zebra, it was curious that none of the blacks interviewed took the occasion to condemn the unknown street killers or express sympathy for the victims.”

Detectives Gus Coreris and John Fotinos were 13-year veterans of the Homicide Unit and led the investigation which eventually cracked the case. Though they both suspected the Black Muslims, it was hard to get any information on the possible suspects because of a ban on surveillance of religious institutions. Moreover, the closed atmosphere of the NOI made it hard to get spies into the organization.

Coreris and Fotinos were able to link the murders because the killers were using the same weapon for each attack. They were also able to put together information and descriptions from those who survived such as Agnos and Hague. The case was solved when one of the members of the Death Angels came forward with information on the other killers. A total of eight black men with previous records were arrested. All were members of the Death Angels. Though this group committed most of the killings, they do not account for all of the criminals. Some are still free to this day.

The Nation of Islam paid for the legal representation of every one of the killers except Cooks, who immediately admitted to his murders. The Death Angels are still in prison but are up for parole in 2002. The European American Issues Forum (EAIF), headed by Calabro, has pledged to attend the parole hearings and work to insure that the killers spend the rest of their lives in jail. In addition, on October 19 of this year, the EAIF will hold its fifth annual Zebra Victims Memorial Service on the steps of San Francisco City Hall. As with the previous five ceremonies, government and community leaders such as Mayor Willie Brown and the leader of the local NAACP will be invited to attend. They have declined to attend any of the ceremonies so far and are not likely to show up this year. Indeed, the lack of publicity and recognition of these racially motivated hate crimes is consistent with the efforts of government agencies, civil rights groups and the media to portray European-Americans as the only perpetrators of hate crimes.

This same type of black-on-white serial murder occurred in the Miami area in the early 1990’s. The racist cult of Yahweh-ben-Yahweh began systematically killing whites in the same manor as the Death Angels. Whites were again described as subhuman “devils” by the cult leaders who urged their black followers to murder random whites. In what was strictly local news, seven whites were ritually slaughtered before the cult was stopped. The leaders of Yahweh-ben-Yahweh are also up for parole in 2002.

It has been almost 30 years since the Zebra Killings and, with the exception of Clark Howard’s book, little has been written about the murders. That is why they have disappeared from the public consciousness. At least one filmmaker who tried to get funding for a documentary on the killings has said that producers will not touch it, as it involves the taboo of black-on-white racism. Needless to say, there is no such taboo on discussing white-on-black racism. But a society that memorializes Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and James Byrd should also make room for the victims of the Zebra Killings. Justice demands it.

Paleoconservative James P. Lubinskas has written for Chronicles, The AIM Report, American Renaissance, The Social Contract, VDARE, The Nationalist Times, American Patrol and other journals.

Please see www.eaif.org for more information on the Zebra Killings Memorial Service.

*Zebra, by Clark Howard, is currently out of print. Used copies can still be purchased on Amazon.com. Click here for details.

**The first chapter of Zebra can be read online by clicking here. (Link in PDF format).

“MOST SERIAL KILLINGS in America take on a life of their own through movies, books and documentaries. The crimes of Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer and The Son of Sam are still well remembered years after they were committed. Yet there is one set of serial killings that has been almost completely forgotten and is rarely mentioned in popular culture.

The Zebra Killings occurred in the San Francisco bay area between 1972 and 1974 and left 73 people dead. They were dubbed the Zebra Killings because of the radio channel used by the police investigating the case (channel Z). The name would take on a more sinister meaning as it became apparent that a group of blacks was systematically stalking and killing whites simply because of the color of their skin.

Zebra (1979) was written by crime writer Clark Howard and remains the definitive book on the murders. Using court records, police reports, witnesses and interviews with the killers themselves, Howard was able to piece together the horrid details of the murders and the unrelenting hatred that inspired the killers……

A few hours after he dropped a dime from a pay phone, detectives brought him to a police station for questioning. He spilled all the beans, telling them about the Death Angels and the point system based on killing white people.

Howard writes that the Black Muslim sect believed white people were an inferior race created by evil scientist named Yacub, and that by killing “blue-eyed devils” or “grafted snakes” — as they called Caucasians — they would be guaranteed entry to heaven. The cops couldn’t believe their ears. But as Harris talked to them, they realized he was the real deal. Only a person who had witnessed the murders would be able to recount them in such detail.

Harris also told them about a killing that hadn’t made the paper, that of a young white homeless man the group had kidnapped from Ghirardelli Square. The men had brought the man back to Black Self Help, stripped him naked and tied him to a column in the loft, Howard writes. Then each of the men had chosen a weapon — a knife, a meat cleaver, a machete — and taken turns hacking him to pieces. Harris told the detectives that he’d dumped the body into the San Francisco Bay.

While the Bay Area around San Francisco gets most of the attention in news stories about the Zebra Killings, this campaign of racist murders by the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) was probably nation wide with 73 whites murdered in the Bay area alone.

Here is a news story about more Zebra murders in Sacramento.

Quote:

SACRAMENTO (AP) – Three Black Muslim youths face life in prison after what the prosecution called random attacks on white men in the name of Muslim teachings.

All three were convicted in Sacramento County Superior Court Saturday of first-degree murder in the death of a white man who was on San Francisco Mayor Joseph L. Alioto’s “Zebra murders” list. The list contained the names of 73 persons whose killings in California since September, 1970, were characterized — Alioto said – by the pattern of operations of a Muslim-related Death Angel group.

But this was not the work of a “splinter” group, the murders were not limited to San Francisco, and it wasn’t a few whites in San Francisco. The mass murder campaign was orchestrated out of the NOI’s headquarters in “New Mecca” (Chicago), was run through each city’s local mosque, and 17 whites were murdered in the City by the Bay alone, just during the period of October, 1973-April 1974. In his classic work, Zebra, Clark Howard estimated that the NOI[b ] murdered 270 whites in the state of California alone during the early 1970s.

During the same period, the NOI also murdered whites in Oklahoma City and New York City,[/b] and an old San Francisco copper who worked the original Zebra detail told me that at the time he saw a secret FBI memo that reported that a parallel campaign was underway on the East Coast.

In the late 1960s or early ’70s, Brooks joined a group of radical Black Muslims headquartered in Oklahoma City . The group has long been suspected in a series of black-on-white crimes, including at least six unsolved slayings, three shootings, two abductions an…

The killers all sought membership in an elite NOI group called the “Death Angels,” which had recruiting meetings and pep rallies in the attic at Black Self-Help. In order to become a Death Angel, one had to murder four white children, five white women, or nine white men.

According to Clark Howard, the NOI had gangs of assassins up and down the state of California:

At that time, there were fifteen accredited Death Angels in California. To achieve their collective membership, they had already quietly killed throughout the state 135 white men, 75 white women, 60 white children – or enough of a combination thereof to give each of them his required four, five, or nine credits.

This was October of 1973. The California attorney general’s office had already secretly compiled a list of forty-five of those killings which had taken place in the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Long Beach, Signal Hill, Santa Barbara, Palo Alto, Pacifica, San Diego, and Los Angeles; and in the counties of San Mateo, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, Contra Costa, Ventura, and Alameda

. All of the victims were white. All the known suspects in the killings had been associated with the Black Muslim movement. The killings were even then continuing throughout the state.

The Zebra killings were the most atrocious manifestation of a phenomenon which began in the 1960s when homicide rates soared in urban America generally. By the late 1970s, San Francisco’s homicide rate was 18.5 per 100,000 population, up from 5.9 in an equivalent period in the early 1960s.

. Much of the increase was driven by a rise in black on white killings. It was in this climate that the Zebra killings occurred.

The Zebra Killers

Machete Attack

San Francisco skyline

A couple in their early 40s, a professor and his wife, were driving through the industrial section of San Francisco late one night in the fall of 1973 when a man staggered out of the shadows toward them.

The area was deserted, illuminated by sparse and dim yellow streetlights, and the couple assumed the man was just another skid-row drunk.

Then they noticed his hands were tied behind his back.

The professor got out of the car and cautiously approached the stranger, who was muttering incoherently and struggling to maintain his balance. The professor called out to him. When the man turned around, the professor gasped. The stranger was hideously mutilated — his skin hung in bloody strips from his skull, as if someone had hacked at his face with a machete.

Someone had.

A few hours before, a group of men had kidnapped the man, Richard Hague, and his wife, Quita, as they took an after-dinner stroll around their neighborhood and forced them into a white van. After sexually molesting his wife, they’d slashed her neck with a machete, nearly decapitating her. They attacked Richard next, presuming that he was dead when he stopped moving. They presumed wrong. After the van drove off, Richard staggered into the street, where the professor and his wife found him.

Chief of Inspectors, Charles Barca

This was the first in a series of violent attacks by assailants known as the Zebra Killers after San Francisco Police Department dedicated the “Z” radio frequency to all communications related to the case. The senseless killings so terrorized San Francisco that residents were afraid to walk the streets after dark and out-of-town visitors booked their vacations elsewhere.

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15 Responses to Zebra Murders

.
Every news story on those “people”
should use the following VOICE OVER …
.
“””And here are some scenes from our next terrifying
episode of ‘NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC’S WILD KINGDOM’ —
as we cautiously observe the impact of the unprovoked and
mind-boggling violent social-behavior as found displayed
among THE TYPICAL HERD-PACK when it is composed OF THE
“Non-Incarcerated-Ghetto-Ground-Ape” (aka. the ‘NIGGA’).”””
.
It should be noted that a baby gazelle surrounded by
a pride of lions is, on certain occasions, safer than
an actual human-being in the presence of THE TYPICAL
“Non-Incarcerated Ghetto-Ground-Ape” (the ‘NIGGA’).
.
May God help humanity and let this entire
species get forcibly sterilized …
throughout the whole world!!!”
.

Can.t stop laughing at your comment, your right though, when they are suffering and have no food to feed their offspring, instead of worrying where the next meal is gonna come from, they get pregnant and expect us to feed them. My answer to all of this was “All the money and aid that is given to them, why don.t they teach the women about contraception, to stop them overpopulating the planet. Also when they find themselves in trouble, they always turn to the white man to feed them, if we left their countries they would be fucked. And the british goverment are a bunch of arseole’s. Even the BNP now has to include other races in their party, is there nowhere safe on the planet without the blacks penetrating or invading. I mean if the bnp ain.t left just british then were screwed.

Well that’s a lie!!! I see more poor begging white folk, old stupid widows and old smoked out white men who can’t wipe they pissy ass and never worked or young druggie ones with a house full of autistic half breeds and criminal records. Don’t forget who loses their mind everyday and kills the whole house and movie theater

I’d never heard of those murders, but i’d heard of jeffrey dahmer who killed a few black homosexuals, amazing isn.t it. Do you think that is because we as normal white people, don.t shout the racist card, but the blacks and asians do at any and every opportunity.

Yes, the Zebra killings were horrible, yes, they were racialy motivated hate crimes. Yes, Black people, as well as white people are capable of commiting horrible, racialy motivated hate crimes.
Still, I find it odd that you are dragging out a crime spred from the early seventies to support some sort of racial conspiracy theory.
What you don’t dwell on is that while the men who commited the crimes were black, so was the man that turned them in. That was a lot more important than making sympathetic noises to news reporters, as you chastize San Francisco’s African Americans of the early seventies for not doing.
In short, the Zebra killers were racists, and so are you.

I find it odd that you are dragging out one of the crimes from the 1970s on my blog and then accusing me of dragging out crimes from the 1970s. There’s 1800-odd articles on this blog you could have commented on, from the 1970s through to this week, and you’ve dragged out one of the articles about a crime from the 1970s to accuse me of dragging out crimes from the 1970s. There are plenty of crimes from the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s on this blog if you think those are more important, but you’ve ignored them all and gone straight to one of the 1970s ones. I didn’t drag it out, you did.

The information I’ve presented includes mention that the Zebra Killers were turned in by one of their own. Don’t presume to dictate to me what details are more important and what I should and shouldn’t “dwell on”. The fact that they killed white people just for being white in the first place is much more important than the fact that one of them eventually turned the others in. There were at least five Zebra Killers and one of them turned the other four in for immunity. That’s 1/5. What about it?

I also find it odd that you equate blogging with murdering. Racist spree-killing is infinitely worse than sharing information about racist spree-killing. If you think what I do is the moral equivalent of the Zebra killers, you’re morally bankrupt. I’m writing a blog. Get your priorities sorted.

I am 48 yrs old and have read books on almost every American serial killing spree since the 1960s and I am SHOCKED that tonight (10/10/13) is the FIRST I ever heard of these killings and I read newspapers, watch documentaries, listen to the radio etc. It is amazing that the American media, the SF police Dept. and the FBI has swept this violent shocking story under the rug. Too many unanswered questions linger about these killings and the involvement of the NOI. I would love to see someone with GUTS do an all out in depth study of these crimes.

Don’t be shocked, this is a gross exaggeration. First off, 71 weren’t killed, 16 were. That is not the only exaggeration. These killings were ghastly, but taking reality and skewing is completely removed all validity.

Nice read, but I disagree with your final sentiment. Tit for tat will just keep us all titting and tatting. Let’s just admit that some of us do horrible things to each other for stupid reasons. The best thing we can do is not carry on that tradition and wait for those who can’t recognize another human being because of some minor difference, to die out!

Whites delusional thought processes and lack of personal responsibility for senselessly wiping out several cultures is truly astounding. Your blog is filled with propaganda and ignorance. If you are going to report information at least have the decency to report accurate information. 71 people were not killed during this massacre. It is obvious that you are an ignorant racist that uses this platform as a means to express your shortcomings as an individual. Blessings to the NOI for making a stand about the lies many white people obviously including yourself, spew. You are very obtuse and stupid. Read more about your history and maybe just maybe God will grant you mercy!

"Perhaps the oddest thing about the experts and police chiefs and reporters and editors and tenured professors who constantly tell us that these black-on-white atrocities aren’t racially motivated, is that blacks don’t believe that for a second. They know that they are racially motivated, they say so, and they celebrate them for it."
- Nicholas Stix